It is not easy to describe Acts of Desperation , Megan Nolan’s brilliant and much-anticipated debut novel. I have seen it billed variously as a love story, an anti-love story, a millennial novel, a novel about being young, about addictive, destructive behaviour and about abuse. But like the essays and criticism for New Statesman, Observer and The New York Times for which Nolan has already gained a following, this is a story handled with a nuance that evades easy categorisation. Told in first-person, with the main narrative interspersed with reflections from a later-day Athens, it’s a compulsive novel, like watching something burn. Early on the unnamed narrator meets Ciaran, who is beautiful, but also distant, with a propensity for capricious cruelty. After a brief breakup (he reunites with his ex-girlfriend), they move in quickly and her world contracts. What follows is a deft exploration of power, coercion and passivity, propelled by the narrator’s own concentrated desire. She labours over meals, bakes cakes, washes clothes, scrubs toilets with a kind of frenzied desperation, creating, “a lively play of domesticity too loud to hear anything over.” “If he got something out of me, I was taking something from him, too,” she tells us. “I was taking away his ability to live without me easily.”